smidgy

The Plasticator

WCI student isolates microbe that lunches on plastic bags:

Getting ordinary plastic bags to rot away like banana peels would be an environmental dream come true.

After all, we produce 500 billion of them a year worldwide, and they take up to 1,000 years to decompose. They take up space in landfills, litter our streets and parks, pollute the ocean and kill the animals that eat them.

Now a Waterloo teenager has found a way to make plastic bags degrade faster -- in three months, he figures.

Daniel Burd's project won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa. He came back with a long list of awards, including a $10,000 prize, a $20,000 scholarship, and recognition that he has found a practical way to help the environment.

Burd, 16, a Grade 11 student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, got the idea for his project from everyday life.

"Almost every week I have to do chores and when I open the closet door, I have this avalanche of plastic bags falling on top of me," he said. "One day, I got tired of it and I wanted to know what other people are doing with these plastic bags."

The answer: not much. So he decided to do something himself.

Via Treehugger

300 Day Loner Island Trip

The new French government must be pushing some sort of programme to urge its citizens to take on extreme solo missions these days. Just days after poor Michel Fournier's hopes of ultimate skydiving were deflated, another enterprising chap from France is going to spend 300 quality days on a remote island with only himself as company and nary a Club Med in sight.

Link: THE PRIVATE ISLANDS BLOG.

French explorer and adventurer Xavier Rosset is about to embark on a 300 day trip to live alone on a remote tropical island in the South Pacific. His adventures will be filmed and used for a 52 minute documentary.

Xavier’s only luggage will be a Swiss army knife, machete video camera and a solar panel for charging the camera. He will spend 10 months alone on an island to develop another way of life through an exciting adventure, a return to the elemental sources. Xavier will survive alone on an island without human interference and without polluting emissions.

The ambition of this documentary is to make a reflection on our lifestyle, our current system and our relationship to nature. And the most important thing is to put the dream and emotion at the heart of adventure natural.

Via boingboing

Placebo Pills to Treat Children

Link: Experts Question Using Placebo Pills to Treat Children - NYTimes.com.

Ms. Buettner, 40, who lives in Severna Park, Md., with her husband, 7-month-old son and 22-month-old twins, envisioned a children’s placebo tablet that would empower parents to do something tangible for minor ills and reduce the unnecessary use of antibiotics and other medicines.

With the help of her husband, Dennis, she founded a placebo company, and, without a hint of irony, named it Efficacy Brands. Its chewable, cherry-flavored dextrose tablets, Obecalp, for placebo spelled backward, goes on sale on June 1 at the Efficacy Brands Web site. Bottles of 50 tablets will sell for $5.95. The Buettners have plans for a liquid version, too.

From Kid World to Photo World

Artist Yeondoo Jung translates the sparkling imagination emanating from kid drawings into photographs.

Via swissmiss

The Quest For Every Beard Type

Link: The Quest For Every Beard Type - Jon Dyer’s Blog.

I’ve been growing a beard every winter for some years now, and every spring, I try to see how many facial hair variations as I can check off from the chart of facial hair types. Listed below are descriptions of the 34 facial hair types from the chart, including examples of the 19 24 variations that I’ve been able to attain so far.

Watch for the Blind

Sentio is a digital watch concept for the blind and partially sighted users, cooked up by designer Matthew Wagerfield. In his own words:               

Sentio is a revolutionary timekeeping device that merges the boundaries between mechanical timepieces and contemporary digital watches. Sentio has been developed as an interactive watch for both blind and partially sighted users. However, due to the universal format in which the time is displayed, anyone can easily use it.

Star Wars Theme Remixed

Apparently, the brass section in the Star Wars theme just isn't "spacey enough". I proudly present to you Michael Machell, a virtuoso "electronic keyboard" player that has re-arranged the ultra famous score into something decidedly more, umm, oh hell, let's say galactic and call it a day.   

A Day With Brands

Link: Fun with brands - Jane’s Brand-timeline Portrait.

All that talk about brand perception got me thinking about how brands affect our daily lives. Have you ever thought about how many brands you use in a typical day? Well I did and created a visual representation of my Typical Friday in Brands. I have to admit that I was pretty surprised at how at how big this thing got once I started working on it. I am also surprised at how much this reveals about me …

Dancer Optical Illusion

Apparently if you see this woman rotating clockwise, then you are more of a "right brain" person and if she is turning around the other way, you guessed, it, you are more of a "left brain" person. With some practice, I could control which direction she turned, which really makes me question what kind of state my grey matter is in.

If anyone knows who created this animation, give me a shout.

For Color Addicts

A site where you can endlessly flip pages of color. No really, that's all there is to it.

Space Weekend

Well it certainly is an exciting time for space junkies. After NASA finally stuck its Phoenix landing on Mars, closer to home a thrill seeking Frenchman by the name of Michel Fournier is prepping himself for "Le Grand Saut" (The Great Leap). Fournier will jump out of a helium balloon at 40,000 meters, hurtle down towards Earth at speeds of nearly 1,000mph (1609km/h), all while praying to sweet Jesus he remembered to pack his oxygen tanks this morning.

Article in the New York Times

Official site

Celebrity Lie Detector

From Mariah Carey to Bill Clinton, find out what your favorite celebs are really talking about.

From RealScoop.com:

RealScoop utilizes leading voice analysis technology to analyze statements made by public figures. The BELIEVABILITY METER™ analyzes each celebrity video second by second, displaying the real-time results in a color-coded manner from left to right. The most believable statements are green, gradually turning red as they become more questionable.

Jewelry Designer Mana Bernardes

Mana Bernardes is a Brazilian designer whose mantra may as well be, "Reduce, Reuse, Rejewel". Certainly, she is not the first person to incorporate banal objects into the world of fashion, but there is a level of simplicity and sophistication in her work that is surprising given her typical raw materials such as toothpicks, hair clips or PET bottles.

Incredible Pet Trick

Who says you can't teach a rat, a cat and a dog new tricks? We're not talking about teaching them 3 tricks either, some determined soul managed them to get along and get on top, literally. Video after the break.

Via CNN

It's a bird, it's a plane, no wait... what?

Garry Kasparov is involved in a serious cock up.

Lego Bag Trick

Mad, bored or curious, take your pick. This man likes to construct Lego without taking the pieces out of the bag.

Air Hostess Style

Photo: Wired.com

This might look like a poster for an Austin Powers movie but is actually an example of vintage Air Hostess Fashion.

From Wired:

From "sky girls" to "stews" to "flight attendants," the story of the airline stewardess is an evolutionary tale. Originally established as an in-flight nursing corps, the earliest stewardesses also served as waitresses, baggage handlers and auxiliary ground crew. As commercial flying grew up, the role of the stewardess changed. Along the way, she reflected her time, evolving from novelty to workhorse to sex symbol, yet always serving with professional competence.

Bill O'Reily: The Rage Remix

The already infamous Bill O'Reilly rage explosion, now available in remixed dance track format.  Music by RevoLucian and video by Torrey.

Via Buzzfeed

iPhone Meets IR-909 Beat Maker

IR-909 brings old school beatmaking to the iPhone:

Back in 1984, Roland released the TR-909 drum machine as a successor to their legendary 808. Over the years, the 909 became one of the most influential and widely-used instruments in the history of electronic music, right up there with the Minimoog and the AKAI MPC sampler.

Now you can pick up IR-909, a free iPhone / iPod Touch version of the 909 over at roventskij.net. It has the 909's 16-step sequencer, eight drum sounds, and four pattern storage.

The minimal, lovely interface is close enough to the 909 for aficionados of the original hardware without sacrificing usability on the iPhone / iPod Touch's small screen.

IR-909 may not be a full-fledged replacement for your software sampler or old-school hardware 909...but I'm betting it's fun to play with on the bus or the train. Or hook it up to a pair of portable speakers and get your "Planet Rock" on anywhere and everywhere. 'Cause I know you got the funk in you.

 

Beware of Facebook Applications

It seems like every time you blink there are a thousand new Facebook applications waiting just around the corner. While most may be perfectly harmless albeit incredibly lame, stupid or just downright annoying, it is relatively easy for someone to setup an application that will harvest Facebook members' personal information.

BBC NEWS | Identity 'at risk' on Facebook.